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It’s not long now ’til we’re treated to the second royal wedding of the year. How lucky are we?
After announcing their engagement in January, Princess Eugenie is set to marry long-term boyfriend Jack Brooksbank in less than 24 hours. (Here’s where you can watch it in Australia.)
Hooray for weddings. Hooray for weddings of the Princess-y kind. And hooray for expanding the royal bloodline.
Except… that’s not really the case for Eugenie and Jack, because – there’s no other way to say it rather than just come out with it – the engaged pair are actually kinda, sorta related.
While they’re not the type of related that means they grew up attending the same family Christmas functions, they do have a distant ancestor in common.
According to UK publication Metro, Thomas Coke, who was the second Earl of Leicester and who died in 1909 is the common link between the engaged pair.
Thomas Coke was actually Jack's great-great-grandfather. And Thomas Coke's daughter, Lady Julie Coke, is the great-great grandmother of Eugenie's mother, Sarah 'Fergie' Ferguson, Duchess of York.
That makes Eugenie and Jack third cousins, twice removed.
Here's a simple diagram to help you figure it all out:
To be honest, third cousins, twice removed is quite the tenuous link. My third cousin twice removed could have made my latte last week and I would have NO IDEA. So it's safe to say the pair were unaware of their family ties when they met on a Swiss ski trip all those years ago.
Of course, Eugenie and Jack aren't the only royal couple who have been proven to have a familial link in recent years.
Prince William and Kate Middleton are 12th cousins, once removed. And Queen Elizabeth II and her husband Prince Philip are both directly related to Queen Victoria, making them third cousins.
And within days of announcing their engagement, for reasons unknown to anyone (although we suspect it's because some people don't want the world to have nice things...) Meghan Markle and Prince Harry were also "shown" to be related.
Yep, the pair apparently share the same great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.
That's... that's 14 greats.
Heck, if that's what we're using to measure if people are related then... WELCOME TO MY FAMILY, DEAR READER!
Listen to the latest episode of Mamamia Out Loud here, were we discuss everything from tennis to the new moon:
Top Comments
14 greats - by the time you go that far back, I could probably prove that I have an ancestor in common with Harry. Counting backwards, if we have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents etc, by the time you get to the 14th great-grandparent, we’re in the region of something like 65,000+ ancestors. Hell, if we go back that far, with my personal heritage, I could probably prove I’m related to a good portion of the people in the UK and Germany!